Multi-messaged.

Three Day Road uses ulterior messaging through the main characters’ life stories to exploit the cultural genocide caused by residential schooling, capitalism, and colonialism that affected indigenous people in Canada for decades. Even today, we can see how the physical and psychological events are still affecting Canada tremendously through poor education, drug abuse, and high suicide rates. Joseph Boyden’s story gives us an interesting perspective through a colonialist lens of what it was like to be the struggling minority during the war in Canada.

When Joseph Boyden writes, he takes an unusual approach to identifying the English speaking, working class, European as the “other”. This is a use of ulterior messaging that is used to assist in discovering information about the text that normally we would never have been able to make connections to. In this text example, “Today I wait for the others to get there before me […] The men are dressed in black and brown and gray suits, and the shoes upon their feet are shiny, so shiny that I wonder what kind of animal the leather has come from. All of the men wear hats, too. All these people wearing hats in summer. I do not understand” (Boyden, 3). We can see here how Niska, the prominent female character, feels misplaced in her own community due to the influx of Europeans arriving in Canada to fight in the war. The introduction of the Europeans who immigrated to Canada brought along with them traditions that ended up squandering those of the indigenous. These changes, although subtle, are examples of how Boyden’s ulterior messaging is highly effective. This is one of the more evident ways that Boyden exploits the cultural genocide that was taking place. When we focus on this more and begin to analyze the main characters through the lens of the outcast, we can see how this exclusion isn’t just a one-off event. Xavier, the protagonist in the story, says, Image result for reading gif black and white

“They speak so fast, and never mess up, even after 6 months of learning I still can’t
seem to even have conversations with them.” (Boyden, 154).

Xavier goes out of his way to learn English in order to be able to communicate ith the people he is fighting alongside in the war. The war is taking place in his own country and the people he’s fighting with don’t even speak the native language! This shows the extent of what the indigenous people went through in order to conform to the ideals and customs of the Europeans. The ulterior message behind the language barrier with Xavier, Nishka and Elijah’s lack of foreign tongue directly relates to the value of their lives in the minds of the Europeans. When placed into a war, that they had no say in, since they can’t communicate with the Europeans, they’re placed on the front lines of a battle and given the dangerous duties because of the lack of communication and ability to make friendships with the Europeans.

These problems have affected Canada for years to come, and the events that took place in Canada 80 years ago still linger today in the forms of lack of education, high percentages of people with addiction, and extremely high suicide rates. The Canadian Institute of Health states that “the suicide rate among Aboriginal youth (ages 18-24) is five to six times higher than that of any other youth groups.” This number has various contributing factors that stem from location, quality of life and the use of drugs. The use of drugs in Aboriginal communities is a problem that has gone unaddressed for many years, and a report by Naho (a first nations news source partnered with Regional Health Survey) shows that “Inuit communities have been even more impacted by illicit drugs, […] cocaine and solvents. Illicit drug users in the 12 months preceding a survey by the Nunavik Inuit Health Society in Nunavik was 60%, more than four times higher than that observed in Canada. It shows that the rates of drug use have clearly increased over the past decade.” Although these statistics are astonishing very little is being done to combat them. These problems also seem to come from the lack of education – the highest dropout rate in Canadian high schools is from aboriginal students. This lack of education leads to poor job selection and unemployment. “According to lead author Dr. Carlos Nordt, of Zurich University’s Psychiatric Hospital, it is not just losing a job but the stressful and uncertain months before it happens, when companies might be looking to make redundancies, that cause suicides.” The unemployment rate coupled with the use of drugs is one of the largest factors contributing to Canada’s suicide epidemic sweeping through the aboriginal people. Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road does a perfect job accounting the events such as residential schooling, and colonial oppression, etc. that caused this current epidemic.

Some have acclaimed that Joseph Boyden’s novel Three Day Road as an honest account of Canadian history. When I personally think about this book and ask myself questions about the book, I am left confused. The main question I am left asking myself is what he had to gain from writing it. I’ve been taught that taking the stories of a culture and its tradition and appropriating them as your own is known to be “textbook colonialism.” So, if that’s true, did Joseph Boyden not just steal a story about the Cree people and appropriate it into a book to profit from? If so, doesn’t that discredit his entire message?